'Downton Abbey' Fans Will Love 'Belgravia' and 'The English Game'

The standout in Belgravia's stellar cast is Harriet Walter, whose highbrow hits would make a fine binge-watch film and TV festival for any Anglophile. She played Lady Shackleton in Downton, the horrid Fanny Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, Princess Margaret in Patrick Melrose, Sister Ursula in Call the Midwife, Clemmie Churchill in The Crown, plus exquisitely executed roles in Atonement, The Young Victoria, Midsomer Murders, Little Dorrit, Succession and Killing Eve.

Walter's Lady Brockenhurst is devastated by her son's death at Waterloo. “Harriet has this ability to play two or three things at once,” says Fellowes. “So that you get a sense of the snobbish dominatrix who wants it all her own way, and at the same time of the bereaved parent, who is always mourning the loss of her child.”

Brockenhurst is astounded when younger, low-born but socially ambitious Anne Trenchard (Tamsin Greig) reveals that her family and Brockenhurst's are both involved in a hushed-up scandal involving unwed romance and untimely death. Shades of Downton's steamy sex secrets! “Lady Brockenhurst is surprised to come up against someone she cannot dominate, because Anne Trenchard refuses to be in her social power. It's a kind of awakening experience.” A bit like Downton's Dowager (Maggie Smith) with her rival, Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton). “The two generations have a mutual duty — the one to urge change and the other to restrain it. That is how you get satisfactory change. We're going through a recent period where we flood ourselves into any change, and it created a period of social chaos.” To which Fellowes’ nostalgic entertainments are the soothing, thrilling antidote.

Fellowes’ football (or soccer) show The English Game is also an upstairs-downstairs class-clash drama that brings a historical epoch to vivid life. “It's a pretty true story — we invented very little,” says Fellowes. “When they formalized football in 1879 and made a proper game of it, the [upper-crust] public-school boys devised all these rules that would leave the control of the game in their hands. They believed the only way of keeping it as a gentleman's game and keeping it civilized was to control it. They did behave very badly. And that's why one is rooting for the northern [working-class] teams, the underdog, to bring that stranglehold on the game to an end."

Just as the toffs feared, the game did get vulgarized, commercialized — and globally popular. “They didn't accept that this was a game that had found its way into the heart of the working class in a way that no other game ever had. The idea that a little group of Old Etonians could hang on to it was a fantasy, really."

Gerard Kearns as Tommy Marshall (left) and Edward Holcroft as Arthur Kinnaird in "The English Game."

Oliver Upton/Netflix

Like Downton and Belgravia, the ripping story has historic significance. “I loved the way it was a playing out in miniature of what was happening all over Western Europe — the days of the landed interests keeping everyone else under control were coming to a swift end. The middle classes and the working classes were taking over the show."

Fellowes’ career isn't coming to an end, and he's glad he didn't win success until he was a grownup: “You're less likely to go crackers. You retain a fairly grownup vision of the industry.” It helps that his popularity — especially among grownup viewers — keeps increasing. Next up is his class-clash HBO drama about 1882 America, The Gilded Age, with Christine Baranski, 67, and Cynthia Nixon, 53. It will start production “when the coronavirus goes down. I haven't any immediate plans to retire because people keep coming up with rather nice things for me to do.”